


Until the End

by mnemosyne23



Series: Revelations - King Arthur [2]
Category: King Arthur (2004)
Genre: Angst, Canonical major character death, F/M, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-08
Updated: 2014-01-08
Packaged: 2018-01-07 22:47:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1125296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mnemosyne23/pseuds/mnemosyne23
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to "Revelations."  Following the Battle of Badon Hill, Guinevere struggles to come to terms with her loss, aided by a hawk, a friend, and the man she mourns.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Until the End

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

 

  
_Forgive me love, I'm going now_  
 _So very far away._  
 _When darkness falls only think me near,_  
 _And do not be afraid._  
 _And please don't grieve when I am gone -_  
 _Abide in what remains;_  
 _Till the shadows end, and we meet again_  
 _At the dawning of the day…_

_-"The Dawning of the Day"_  
 _as sung by Mary Fahl_

* * *

Darkness that was not dark had fallen over Badon Hill. Tar-soaked fires still burned on the grassy hillocks which lined the base of the Wall, providing light for the warriors who had set aside their weapons to gather the bodies of the dead. It was gruesome, bloody work, made all the more grim by the chill fog that had settled over the battlefield. Each breath of air made the mist swirl and eddy, as though stirred by unseen hands.

It was against this backdrop of specters and silent carnage that Guinevere made her way to the stable. It housed more than horses now; Arthur had commissioned it a temporary morgue for Tristan and Lancelot. Lancelot had told her that in Sarmatia, it was said that the souls of mighty warriors returned to Earth in the guise of great horses. Fitting, Guinevere thought, that the knights should await their final burial here, amidst their stamping, steaming stallions.

Had it been only last night that he told her that legend? It seemed much longer-

No.

Much less. It seemed much less than a night ago that Lancelot had laid beside her, his long limbs twined with her own, telling her stories of a home he could barely remember. It could not have been last night - it was too much time. She would have known. Every second since he'd kissed her in the corridor until this very moment had thundered in her head like a hammer-strike. It had not been a day. Too much had happened - so many losses and victories could not be compiled into the span of a SINGLE DAY!

_It was still last night. That MUST be it. The sun had not yet risen, and the battle had not been fought. There was time! Still time! She would tell Arthur of this dream, and Lancelot as well, and she would-_

His face was white as milk. It seemed to rise out of the night as she stepped through the stable door. The knight's arms had been folded onto his chest, and his hands loosely grasped the pommels of his twin swords, which were crossed over his stomach, points down. Even in death he seemed ready to spring.

Guinevere stopped just inside the doorway and stared. They lay side by side, Tristan and Lancelot, on matching oak benches, separated by a straw-covered walkway wide enough for two men to walk abreast. Both men had been washed, the blood scrubbed from their clothing, so that now they seemed to glow in the hazy moonlight which pierced the fog and seeped through the stable's windows and open door.

When finally Guinevere moved again, it was not Lancelot whom she visited first. Tristan's eyes were closed, his chest still, his bedraggled hair swept back from his face. She gazed down at the knight and tried to will his eyes open. Of all Arthur's knights, Tristan had scared her the most. There was a feral quality to the mysterious loner that had outmatched Guinevere's own untamed nature; a half-crazed glint in his eye that made her wonder if death even mattered to him. Here was a man who would fight to the death for a lost cause and never dream of retreat. Who had done so. Who had died doing so. Guinevere wondered if she would have done the same. If the tide of battle had turned in the Saxons' favor, would she have stayed and fought? Or would she have retreated to the forest, to attack again another day? Did it matter if you won the battle, only to the lose all your fighters and have no war?

"Thank you," she whispered, gazing down at his angular face. "You fought when you didn't have to, for people who were not your own. Your blood has made this field holy." Hesitating only a moment, she reached down and touched his hair, spreading the familiar tendrils of his shaggy black mane over his face. He had been a secretive man in life; she did not think he would appreciate being laid so bare in death.

Turning from Tristan, Guinevere gazed at Lancelot's face and felt her throat close. The sour taste of bile touched the back of her tongue and she forced it down with a grimace.

Two steps brought her to his side, and she hovered at his shoulder, lost in thought. Last night she had watched him sleeping; if she concentrated, she could imagine he was sleeping now. But there was no warmth, no breath, no touch of dreamy fingers on her hip. No, he was not sleeping. Sleep implied life and renewal; this stable was steeped in death.

"The dead are walking tonight," she murmured, resting her hand on his head and gently stroking his curls. They were cold and brittle. "They are stirring in the mist like ripples on a river." Her fingers curled behind his cold ear. "I wonder if you are with them? Or have you moved on and found yourself a grassy meadow to rule?"

Guinevere slowly dropped to her knees, resting her chin on the board beside his shoulder, gazing at his placid profile. "Arthur says that when we die, we live again," she murmured. "He says we wake again in the presence of his Lord, and we know no pain. We know no fear. There is light, and there is hope, and there is joy." She swallowed, and it hurt. "I wonder if he believes it now. He is angry with his God. Angry that his God saw fit to steal you from this Earth, and leave us here to suffer your loss."

 

_"I have watched them die, and I have asked myself over and over, WHY DO I NOT JOIN THEM? What makes me worthy of this life? What special purpose do the gods have for me, that they would rob the world of so many good men, yet leave me to rot?"_

His voice echoed in her head, rolling through her mind like wind over water, and she found that she was crying. The world blurred around the edges and her throat burned as she extended her arm and clutched at his bone-cold hand. Her fingers dug into his immobile flesh, and she moaned when his fingers did not so much as squeeze her hand in return.

"Tell me now," she whispered desperately, pulling herself higher and pressing her face into the crook of his neck. "Tell me what you see. Are you running? Are you flying across hilltops, or surging through ocean currents?" She raised her head and gazed into his face with streaming eyes. Her fingers clawed at his leather vest , as though they had a mind of their own; as though she could somehow find a heartbeat if she could only reach his flesh. "Lancelot? Tell me what you see! Where have you gone!"

With a garbled cry she pulled herself up from the floor and threw her arms around the knight's motionless body. Pressing her face into his shoulder, she wept an ocean. She wept her burning country. She wept a hundred valiant knights, decimated to four. She wept an uncertain future, wed to a man she loved with only half her heart. But most of all she wept the hole in her breast that had housed the other half of her heart, and now was home only to a smoky, sweat-drenched memory.

"Lancelot…!" Guinevere gasped, when at last she'd recovered her breath. Her fingers curled on his chest and she closed her eyes, letting her cheek rest heavily on his breastbone as she panted for air. "Tell me there is no pain… I could not bear it if you felt this pain as I feel it. You have suffered enough… lost enough in the life you lived on this earth." Her head shook numbly against his chest as her eyes opened and she stared vacantly at his chin. "It is dank and wet and miserable here, and I feel none of it for this gnawing in my belly that tells me you are gone."

A cold night breeze drifted across the back of her neck, and she shivered. "Not you, my Lancelot," she whispered. "Not you. You were never cold."

Supporting herself on the edge of the table with both hands, Guinevere pushed herself into a standing position. The tears had made her thirsty and dizzy, but she did not sway as she lingered at his side.

"Tomorrow they will burn you," she told him quietly, voice a harsh rasp in her throat. "No burial for Lancelot, Sarmatian knight. No place of remembrance. No tribute to your memory. Rootless in death, even as in life." She shook her head and clutched the table with rigid fingers. "Did it never occur to you, Lancelot, that those who loved you might want a grave?"

Her tears had already begun to dry, and soon she would have to return to the battlefield to aid in the collection of her dead countrymen. There would be more tears to shed this night; Lancelot could not have a monopoly on her sorrow.

"Good night, my knight," she murmured. Leaning forward, she pressed her lips to his cold forehead, and imagined she kissed his statue, not his corpse. "Dwell in the light," she whispered against his flesh. "Gods willing, I will meet you there. Wait for me. Never let me go."

Pulling back, she turned aside and walked away without looking back, out into the fog.

She did not speak again that night.

 

\---------------------------------

**TWILIGHT of the NEXT DAY**

 

_You said I own your life. Is that correct?_

It was almost dusk, and the wind blew cool and unrestrained across Guinevere's face. It tugged at her hair and carried the unmistakable, smoky scent of incoming snow. The skeletal branches of the nearby trees looked sharp as blades in the cold, clear air, and their shadows fought and jostled for dominance as the wind tossed their branches beneath the setting sun. The world was bathed in scarlet and orange; the colors of blood and autumn. Cycles of death.

 

_Then it's settled. I will not let you die._

Beneath the cold musk of approaching snow, a sharper smoke lingered on the air. It left a bitter taste on her tongue and made her eyes sting, yet Guinevere could not bring herself to rise from her position beside Lancelot's smoldering grave. Some embers still glowed red, spurred to new life by the ubiquitous wind, while others had long since grown cold and gray and utterly lifeless. She rubbed a soot-smudged hand idly up and down her arm in a half-hearted attempt to keep warm, while her dark eyes watched a particular cinder pulse and spark with each breath of air. A dead man's heartbeat.

 

_Perhaps all I have done, all I have survived, has been to prepare me to be your protector._

Guinevere smiled faintly, tears blurring her vision. She ignored them. "Who will be my protector now, Lancelot?" she murmured, letting her hand drop from her arm and reaching out to comb her fingers through the cold ash that lined the edge of his grave.

A flutter and sharp movement beside the next nearest grave caught Guinevere's attention, and she raised her head to see what had arrived. A familiar hawk with dark, russet plumage had settled beside Tristan's grave. Bright, black eyes rolled back and forth as the raptor surveyed the turned earth and scratched at the soil with her talons.

"Hello, Iseult," Guinevere murmured, watching the hawk scrape at the ground. "We are a pair, are we not? Both come to mourn brave men lost in battle, while we linger untethered in the world they left us to guard."

Her eyes drifted slowly over Tristan's burial mound. The man had been a mystery; as transient as falling snow. It felt odd to know that his body lay six feet beneath the earth, solid as her own flesh, while Lancelot - her touchstone - was nothing now but ash, smoke and memory.

A footstep behind her announced another's arrival, but she did not look over her shoulder to see who it was.

"Guinevere," a familiar voice said in greeting.

Now she did look back, a sad smile touching her lips. "Gawain," she acknowledged.

The knight nodded his head to her and continued into the cemetery. The setting sun set his hair aglow in a fiery aura, obscuring his kindly face. He came to a stop at the foot of Tristan's grave and rested his hand on the pommel of his sword.

"I saw Iseult," he explained, nodding to the bird who had not moved from beside Tristan's grave. "For certain Tristan did not want her to linger. He meant her to be free after his death." Gawain shook his head and chuckled softly. "He did not understand his own appeal."

"Indeed he didn't," Guinevere agreed. "He was a unique soul."

"He was." Slowly, Gawain knelt at the foot of his friend's grave. "She is not a tamed bird," he explained to Guinevere, not taking his eyes from Iseult. "Tristan would never have imagined taming a wild creature. It was more like they found each other when one needed the other. I don't know how it worked; much about Tristan was a secret, his relationship with Iseult not least among them." He smiled. "Perhaps she thinks he needs her now, to shepherd him beyond the veil."

Guinevere nodded, also watching the hawk, who was ruffling her feathers and ducking her head. "Or perhaps he thinks she needs him now," she mused softly, "and he's called her here to explain where he has gone."

Gawain looked at her, and Guinevere shook herself out of her reverie under his scrutiny. "Perhaps," he said, as she sat up straighter and stared down at her soiled hands, unwilling to meet his eyes.

A few quiet minutes passed between them; the most uncomfortable minutes of Guinevere's life. Gawain was a good man, yet somehow his gaze felt threatening.

He knew.

There was no doubt about that. It hit Guinevere with a jolt when she realized that EVERYBODY knew. The other knights knew. Arthur - good, solid Arthur - knew. How could she allow herself to be so transparent?

"I should be getting back to the encampment," she said quickly, starting to stand, dusting her hands off on her cloak. A cord inside her frayed and split as she realized she was smearing Lancelot across her robes. It made her feel low and angry and desperate to run. She stilled her hands. "I will see you back there soon, Gawain, I hope?" She turned and took a step.

"There is a saying in Sarmatia," Gawain said, and she stopped moving, her back to him. "It says that when a mighty warrior dies-"

"He returns to earth as a great horse," Guinevere finished for him, not looking back. "I… have been told."

She heard leather creak as Gawain stood behind her. "Horses are amazing creatures," he explained. "Intelligent, valiant, loyal. Without them, a knight is nothing more than a foot soldier."

Footsteps approached as Gawain moved to stand at her side. She did not look at him.

"Intelligence and courage are impossible to tame," he said quietly. "We imagine the beasts we ride are domesticated, but all you need do is look in your horse's eye to know that you ride him because he allows it, not because it is your right." She saw him glance over his shoulder out of the corner of her eye, towards Tristan's grave. "I think perhaps that is why Iseult is waiting by his grave. Tristan was never tame, and his horse will never be ridden. He will gallop through mountain valleys, and she will go with him; lord and lady of earth and sky. She waits now for a sign to tell her where he waits. It is an enviable position, I'll warrant you."

"How so?" Guinevere asked, her voice little more than a whisper. "She may fly with him, but she can never be with him. They will be always separated by feathers and fur."

"As they were before, by feathers and flesh."

"But now he cannot speak to her."

"He could not before."

"They were different creatures!"

"But of one mind." Gawain looked down at his feet, then up again at the sky. "That is what is important, Guinevere. Not what separates us, but what connects us. Tristan did not need to see Iseult to know she was there. Just as she does not need to see him now to know he still lives, albeit in a different form." He sighed. "Curse it, Arthur is the worldly man of words, and Galahad is far more expressive of speech. I cannot say what needs saying and make it come out correctly."

Guinevere finally dared to look at him. "I am not a scholar, Gawain," she said softly. "Simply say what you mean."

Gawain looked at her. After a moment, he spoke. "The men we buried today each had a love," he said. "Tristan's was Iseult. Lancelot's was another. Both were separated from their loves by barriers beyond their control, yet still they loved. And now we have lost them, and mourn their passing.

"But Iseult does not mourn. She waits. Because the ones we love are always at our shoulder, watching us; even in death. So what if the barriers between them have changed form? She is still his loyal Iseult, and he is still her Tristan."

Guinevere was quiet for a minute. "But what if she someday has another master?" she murmured. "What if she has had another master all along, and has shared her fidelity between them? How can she fly free with Tristan through your mountain valleys if there is another man waiting for her to come to him in need?"

Gawain stared out across the cemetery, towards the Wall beyond the hills. "She is not a tame hawk," he told her again, "and love is not a quantity. She will love whom she wants when she wants, and even when she is not with them, she will be at their shoulder." He was silent, then added, "Just because a love is shared does not mean it loses potency. A worldly man understands this."

They stood in silence, and Guinevere let herself drift.

 

\---------------------------------

_It seemed she skimmed through cloud and dipped low over cold highland lakes._

_There were no horses. There was a man. A tall, whip-thin man with dark, stormy eyes that sparkled with laughter. He stood on a hilltop and held out his arm. She took it, and she was Guinevere again._

_"Will you walk, my lady fair, to the Gates beyond despair?" he said, giving her a dashing smile._

_"I did not know you were a poet, Lancelot," Guinevere told him as they walked side by side through the knee-high grasses. She beamed up at him. He was brilliant in the sunshine._

_"I have many talents of which you are unaware, Guinevere," he replied, and smiled down at her. "And I am not much of a poet at that, for there are few men who would call you fair."_

_"Indeed?"_

_"Raven-haired is perhaps more appropriate."_

_"But does not suit the meter of the rhyme."_

_"As you say."_

_They walked in silence, and Guinevere reveled in his solid presence at her side. This was not real; it was a fantasy concocted out of grief. But she could smell him, and his voice was rich velvet to her ears. His arm was strong and warm beneath her hands, and the rough stitching of his clothes rubbed her cheek as she rested her head on his shoulder._

_"You are grieving for me."_

_Guinevere raised her head to look at his profile. Lancelot kept his eyes straight ahead, fixed on the horizon. "I grieve, yes," she agreed. "For you and many others."_

_"But there is no one else here, so I must dominate your thoughts."_

_Guinevere looked away and did not answer._

_"You must not grieve, Guinevere," he continued, turning his eyes down to look at her. "As well to lament the sun sinking at dusk or the rise and fall of the tides. All men die."_

_"You are not all men."_

_"Stop." Lancelot stopped walking and turned to face her. Holding her shoulders, he gazed down into her eyes. "I died as I wished to die: in a battle of my choosing. MY choosing, Guinevere. Given the choice I would do it again. Did I not say I would protect you at all costs?"_

_Tears threatened to fill Guinevere's eyes, but she refused to give in to them. She had cried enough over the last two days. "You said many grand things, Lancelot," she told him, "yet I meant you to outlive me. I did not intend either of us to die so soon, you least of all."_

_"A selfish attitude, Guinevere."_

_"Selfish!" she snapped, glaring at him. This was familiar territory; two days past, and she missed her arguments with him almost more than the tender moments._

_"Yes, selfish." His quietude annoyed her, but his face remained placid. "Do you think that your life is somehow less important than mine? I had taken you for less of a fool. No no, don't huff and glare at me, Guinevere. You are meant for greater things than this humble knight. Destiny is real, and I have lived mine. Yours has merely begun."_

_Guinevere turned her gaze away from him, her cheeks hot with suppressed emotion. She knew he was right._

_"You love Arthur, Guinevere." She squeezed her eyes shut, struggling to keep the tears at bay a little longer. Hearing the words on his lips made them somehow more beautiful and more painful than saying them to herself. "I know you do. I have always known. You said as much yourself the night before the battle. And he loves you. I am not so obtuse as to think you and I could ever be more than lovers, and distant ones at that." His fingers grazed her chin and Guinevere opened her eyes. His smile was spectral through her tears._

_"We knew each other, and that was good," he told her. "We loved, and that was better. I have died, and that is best, because it leaves your destiny uncluttered. Build a country with Arthur. Love him, and your people through him. Have children. Name one Lancelot, if you must. But do not live a half-life because I am not there to live it with you. It wounds Arthur, and it diminishes you, and neither effect is satisfactory to me." Lancelot's hand cupped her cheek and Guinevere leaned into the touch. Tears spilled from the corner of her eye and pooled against his thumb._

_He smiled. "I do not leave you, Guinevere," he whispered, stroking her cheekbone with his thumb. "Think that I am around a distant corner, or waiting in a quiet room. Someday I will see you again, and the meeting will be all the happier for the time spent apart."_

_She reached up and pressed his hand harder against her cheek. "I fear I will forget you," she whispered, her throat choked with fear and unshed tears._

_"That doesn't matter," he murmured, moving closer and pulling her gently against his chest. His chin came to rest on the top of her head. "I won't forget you."_

_"What of Arthur?"_

_"I won't forget him either."_

_"No. I… I mean, we all… die… What of him? And you? And…me?"_

_She felt his chest vibrate as he laughed quietly. "Do you think discord can exist in this place?" he asked quietly, combing soothing fingers through her hair. "Here there is no pain. There is no fear. There is time and light and beauty, and I am content."_

_Guinevere held him tightly, and Lancelot rocked her gently back and forth. Few men had ever seen her weak. Arthur was one. Her father was another. No man had ever MADE her weak, until Lancelot._

_"I love you," she murmured, as she felt a cool breeze ruffle her hair. The illusion was beginning to dissolve._

_"I love you," he whispered, ducking his head lower so his breath tickled her ear. "You learn when you die that love binds the world into a whole. We are all sewn together with stitches made of love, Guinevere, and if I might say so, you are quite the patchwork."_

_She giggled and pulled back to look into his face. He was growing translucent now; she could see stars through his dancing eyes. "You will wait for me?" she asked, touching his cheek._

_He nodded beneath her palm. "Till the very end. And you will live for me?"_

_It was her turn to nod. "Till the very end."_

_"Then I will not have died in vain."_

_"Nor I lived."_

_The transparency was growing stronger. Guinevere could see snatches of the graveyard filtering through the golden afternoon sunshine of this netherworld. "There is not much time left," she said._

_Lancelot smiled at her, though he was little more now than a shadow. "There is always time," he told her. "It just doesn't like to wait."_

_"Will you never stop joking?"_

_"I'm afraid not."_

_"Please kiss me, before I lose you again."_

_"Your wish-"_

_Guinevere cut him off. She took his ghostly face between her hands and kissed him with all the power she possessed. She poured her breath, her lust, her greed, her desperation into the kiss. Strong arms - strong as life - wrapped around her waist like iron cables and held her tight. A frantic moan spilled through her lips into his mouth as she tried to hold him closer. She wanted to climb into him, make him her bed, live in him like a secret chamber. Her tongue felt out the contours of his mouth, memorizing every ridge and smooth plane. His taste lodged in her sensory memory and she sucked on his lips, desperate to crystallize it permanently in her mind._

_"Goodbye…" Lancelot panted against her mouth as they at last separated._

_"No…!" she begged, pulling him back. "Not yet…!"_

_He was melting beneath her hands. Already her fingers were slipping through his hair. She couldn't find purchase on his shoulders, and his arms were turning to wisps of smoke around her waist._

_"Don't go…!" she pleaded, watching with heartbroken eyes as he faded away. "Please…!"_

_"Until the end," he said, and his voice sounded far away, as though he spoke to her through a tunnel._

_"The end, Lancelot!" she cried, tears pouring unchecked and unnoticed down her face. Her fingers reached out, clutching at empty air. "The end!"_

_There was a breath of air, a sharp cold breeze, and he was gone._

 

\--------------------------

Guinevere's eyes snapped open. The sun had set, and she was alone in the empty graveyard. A flake of snow fell in front of her eyes and landed on her nose, and she swept it away, pausing afterward to touch her cheek. Her fingertips came away wet, and her throat burned.

There was a rustle to her right and her head snapped to the side in time to see Iseult rocket into the sky. The hawk was framed for a moment against the rising moon before her trajectory flattened out and she soared northward, towards the rocky landscape that waited beyond the Wall. Guinevere wondered if the hawk's sharp eyes saw a mighty horse galloping across a distant field in the snow.

More flakes were falling now, getting thicker with each passing second. A squall, but not a storm. Shivering, she pulled her cloak tighter around her shoulders and began to turn around to say her last farewells to the graves behind her.

She stopped mid-turn. No. She had said goodbye. To say it again would be redundant. Lancelot had told her to live, and there could be no forward motion if she spent her life in a constant cycle of goodbyes.

Turning back to the front again, Guinevere began to walk, picking her way carefully through the graves. Arthur would be waiting for her at the fortress, but first she would check on her fellow _woads_ in their forest encampment. It would give her tears time to dry. A piece of her yearned to look over her shoulder, but she kept her eyes straight ahead.

Behind her, a snowflake fell on a pulsing ember in a dead man's grave. It flickered once, and then it died.

**THE END**


End file.
